The following is a letter from Lawrence Santiago, who received his MA in Philosophy from NUS in 2007.
Exactly two years ago, I was interviewed in Montreal, Quebec, Canada for the Trudeau Scholarship. The Trudeau Scholarship is Canada’s most highly coveted doctoral scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. The scholarship competition is open for Canadian students studying in universities in Canada and abroad as well for non-Canadians studying in Canada. Some claim that it is Canada’s answer to the Rhodes or Fulbright Scholarships. To get the scholarship, one has to be nominated by the candidate’s research supervisor, then by her Department, and finally by her University. By a stroke of luck and hard work, I was sent by my home university, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and was eventually chosen by external and selection committees of the Trudeau Foundation to be among the final 25 for an interview. I was finally chosen to be part of the final 15, the only non-Canadian in my cohort as well as the first to come from a Singaporean institution of higher education in the history of the scholarship.
In the morning of my interview, I put aside all my nerves and decided to leave the interview process to fate. After all, just to arrive at that stage was enough confirmation that I have an intellectual project worth pursuing. A panel of 4 interviewed me: there were 3 senior academics from a wide range of fields outside my specialization, a historian, a sociologist and a lawyer, as well as 1 leading Canadian journalist. During my interview, I was asked many questions about my personal and academic background. I was very clear to them that I came from Asia, and particularly, educated in the Philippines and Singapore. Then, they asked me the most challenging question: exactly how my academic background that is mostly in philosophy (at this stage, they have read my file well!) can enable me to do my research project informed by the methodologies and theories of the social science discipline I was enrolled in, human geography. They also asked me whether I would pursue this project normatively or empirically.
To the first question, my response was simple: while I am currently studying human geography, my theoretical background in philosophy is not a hindrance but in fact, a valuable asset that would allow me to understand and explain my research question theoretically. I told them that while philosophy won’t probably be part of most of my interviews and participant observation among the key informants of my study, I expect to eventually return to philosophical questions in framing my dissertation. I told them how combining timely concerns with timeless questions have always fascinated me. While contemporary social scientists research about issues that currently affect us, philosophers and other humanists often reach beyond the present and try to understand how our current perplexities have been dealt with by thinkers of the past. To the second question, I told them that I will try to do both, and it is precisely the reason why I wanted to have the opportunity to be a Trudeau Scholar. I wanted to pursue cross-disciplinary scholarship and not be confined to just one way of thinking about the world, but have the opportunity to experiment with various ways of thinking, that could then be translated to various ways of describing and knowing the world.
In May 2009, I received news that I got the $240,000CAD scholarship. Beyond the monetary value that would enable me to pursue my scholarship in a comfortable way, it also gave me access to a community of other similarly minded individuals, including other scholars, mentors and Canadian leaders in academia, business and government who are pursuing amazing intellectual projects that could possibly have an impact on the world. Looking back to my interview, and especially on the creation of my project proposal, apart from the tremendous support of my professors and supervisors from my current institution (the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia), I would have probably not gotten the scholarship if not for the intellectual training I got from the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore.
At NUS Philosophy, I had the opportunity to write a Masters thesis in political philosophy with a supervisor who allowed me to experiment creatively with thinking, Sor Hoon. She allowed me to read anything I want, and write a thesis in the style and pace that satisfies my curiosity on the subject. However, we also had a lot of conversations about the whole world outside of it. I also had the chance to take classes with analytically sharp and rigorous thinking Singaporean students like Weng Hong and with teachers like Prof. Chen and Prof. Alan Chan. It was also at NUS that I saw the value of doing cross-disciplinary inquiry for the first time, as I took an Independent Study Module (ISM!) on deliberative democratic theory (that eventually became the main subject of my thesis) with Ethan Putterman of the Department of Political Science. My turning point to study Geography was a result of a serendipitous encounter with a fellow Filipino student Bea Lorente, who was then doing her PhD at the Department of Linguistics. She led me to a part-time job as a research assistant at the Asia Research Institute under Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang of the Department of Geography. Apart from the ideas that were inculcated to me during this ‘incubation period’ (and I’m still incubating!) of what would be my PhD dissertation project, it was mostly the people from NUS Philosophy and NUS at large, who gave me the space and freedom to experiment with different ways of thinking creatively that brought me to the point of having genuine and straightforward answers to the two questions posed to me during that life changing interview two years ago.
After more than 2 years of fieldwork across the Pacific and the Atlantic, I just began writing my dissertation here in Toronto. Before buckling down, I travelled around Asia, North America and Europe, and interviewed migrant health workers, government bureaucrats, business professionals, policymakers and academics who deal with the everyday creation and management of professional and state ‘borders.’ In short, my dissertation (which I’m just beginning to write!) will be an examination of how the issue of international recruitment and migration of health workers became an issue of global justice. While I use methodologies in social and political geography to explain my topic, I also engage with political theories of global justice, particularly, the ideas of Amartya Sen.
In an interview, philosopher Martha Nussbaum once said: “As for the people who are still in the profession (of philosophy), I think the basic quality of work in moral and political philosophy is pretty high, but I wonder where the people of large insight and imagination are in the younger generation, people with the sort of humanistic breadth exemplified by (Bernard) Williams. I sometimes think that we are becoming smaller, and that it would be a good thing if people who wrote on moral and political philosophy read more novels and poems, and spent more time encountering real human beings in different parts of the world.” For me, Nussbaum’s invocation is simple: for philosophy to flourish continuously, philosophers should read outside philosophy, travel and then think big. I certainly read outside philosophy, travelled and hopefully, both have expanded my thinking about the world as well. I honestly haven’t decided whether my current work will be an intervention in contemporary political philosophy but with a geographical twist, or an intervention in geography with a political philosophical twist. But I know one thing for sure: I am a philosopher by vocation, and a social scientist (geographer) by current profession. And I have NUS Philosophy to thank for igniting the fire in my belly to pursue thinking in the world with both reason and passion.
About the Author
Lawrence Santiago is a Trudeau Scholar and PhD Candidate from the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, where he is finishing his dissertation entitled ‘Spaces of Expertise and Geographies of Global Justice: The International Recruitment and Migration of Health Workers’ based on an extensive global and intensive local ethnographic fieldwork and analyzes the role of people and institutions in making and mapping global justice through the question: how can limited health human resources be equitably distributed across state and market borders? From May-November 2010, he was a Metropolis BC-MITACS research fellow and did his fieldwork at Health Match BC, a health care recruitment service funded by the government of British Columbia) where he led organizing the academic-policy workshop Health Worker Migration in Canada: Histories, Geographies, Ethics. For his MA in Philosophy (2007) at NUS, he studied with Tan Sor Hoon and wrote a thesis on the space of passion and rhetoric in deliberative democratic theory.